Uigun

(real name Rakhmatulla Atakuziev). Born May 1 (14), 1905, in the village of Merke, in what is now Dzhambul Oblast, Kazakh SSR. Soviet Uzbek poet and playwright. Honored Art Worker of the Uzbek SSR (1956). People’s Poet of the Uzbek SSR (1965). Member of the CPSU since 1944.

Uigun graduated from the Samarkand Pedagogical Academy in 1930; his work was first published in 1925. Uigun’s poetry collections Joys of Spring (1929), The Second Book (1933), To the Land of the Sun (1936), Rage and Love (1943), and Poems (1950) are devoted primarily to Soviet Uzbekistan.

Uigun began writing for the theater in the 1940’s. His dramatic works include Alisher Navoi (1940, coauthor I. Sultanov); Mother (1942); A Risque Joke (1944), one of Uzbekistan’s best comedies, about life on an Uzbek kolkhoz during the war years; Song of Life (1947); the comedies Altynkul’ and Early Spring (both 1948); and Khurriiat (Freedom, 1959), about the life of an Uzbek woman working on a kolkhoz. Social problems and problems of morality within the family are sharply presented in Friends (1961). Two Eras (1967; Russian translation, 1968), about the construction of the Farkhad Hydroelectric Power Plant, approaches its subject in both contemporary and historical contexts. Uigun has also translated works by A. S. Pushkin, A. P. Chekhov, L. N. Tolstoy, T. G. Shevchenko, and other writers.

Uigun was chairman of the Writers’ Union of the Uzbek SSR from 1951 to 1954. He has been awarded two Orders of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution, four other orders, and various medals.